The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Concerned About Unconventional Mental Health Interventions?

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Love & Logic (R) and Other Non-evidence-based Programs: How to Argue Against Them

A colleague passed on to me a letter from a person
with a MSN degree who is involved with community mental health issues for
children. The writer expressed her profound concerns with the program Love
& Logic ®, developed and promulgated by Foster Cline, an early advocate of
Attachment Therapy/Holding Therapy, and a pediatrician of problematic licensure
who declared some years ago that “all bonding is trauma bonding”. No doubt
aided by its brilliantly alliterative name, Love & Logic ® has become a
great commercial success, earning much public money as school systems buy into
this method of group training for parents and teachers, even though it is clear
that the program is not an evidence-based treatment.

The author of the letter I mentioned has had years of
contact with Love & Logic ®, beginning with a personal experience involving
a child she advocated for, and
continuing with discussions with people committed to the method, and awareness
of increasing advertising. She checked the level of research evidence for Love
& Logic ® with the California Evidence-based Clearinghouse for Child
Welfare (www.cebc4cw.org ). CEBC, which is well-known for its descriptions and
ratings of treatments for children, lists Love & Logic ® but notes that the
program cannot be rated because there is no adequate research evidence for its
effectiveness. CEBC lists a 2005 article that reported that parents liked the
Love & Logic ® program but did not touch on its effectiveness as a
behavioral treatment for children. CEBC notes that there are no standards that
trainers for Love & Logic have to meet other than attendance at training
workshops (and it is my understanding that there is no follow-up from the
organization to insure that trainers are teaching the program correctly).

Love & Logic ® is not listed by the National Registry
of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (run, at least until recently, by
SAMHSA) or by www.effectivechildtherapy.org,
a service of the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. I should
also point out that in the opinion of some psychologists, the trademark for
Love & Logic ® should prevent its ever being listed as an evidence-based
treatment, because commercial considerations mean that evidence may be kept
secret rather than being presented transparently as is required by scientific
investigations.

The argument against Love & Logic ® hinges on the
concept of evidence-based treatment. Unfortunately, American public education is
coming very late to the idea that evidence-based programs are preferable, and
indeed the greater number of educators and school administrators have little training
or interest in understanding how safe and effective treatment programs can be
identified. A recent wave among psychologists of opposition to the privileging
of evidence-based treatments will no doubt be welcomed by many educators.

How, then, to argue against treatments that are
unsupported by acceptable research evidence? Surely the key to this argument is
to approach the organizations that fund school systems’ activities. State and
local governments may also be indifferent to research results in general, but
they do not like to spend money, and they do like to get what they pay for.
Being revealed as wasters of public funds is a good way not to get re-elected.
School officials themselves do not allocate funding--they simply ask for funds to be spent, so
they are not likely to suffer public disapproval for choosing a
non-evidence-based program. Neither are they elected and subjected to public
scrutiny and possible loss of their positions.

A major point of the movement toward evidence-based
treatment is that scarce resources are conserved when programs are chosen on
the basis of high levels of evidence of their safety and effectiveness. Are
state and local officials prepared to justify expenditures that are based on
unsupported commercial claims rather than on evidence of effectiveness? It’s
hard to imagine that they could get away for long with giving a school lunch
contract to a company whose service did not live up to the standards required in
the contract. A heating company that kept schools at 45 degrees F. all winter
would not be hired again. It’s a lot harder to decide whether parent and
teacher training programs have been effective, so there will probably be few
complaints from the recipients—but community members who publicly bring up the
lack of existing evidence for a program may well have a political impact on the
actions of elected officials.

In addition to suggesting that state and local
officials receive public criticism for funding non-evidence-based programs like
Love & Logic ®, I’d like to point out that teachers’ unions are a powerful
force and indeed are organizing for greater effectiveness just now. Union
organizers may be receptive to the argument that ineffective training programs
are being funded while money is not made available for a variety of educational
necessities, even textbooks in some cities. Union members may be pleased with parent or
teacher training that can make their work more successful, but why should they
stand by to see needed funds expended without results? Speaking up on this kind
of issue can be a way for teachers’ organizations to work against the
increasing deprofessionalization of their jobs and to make clear that
collective bargaining can work toward goals other than salary and benefits increases,
important as those are.

A point to be brought up when arguing against programs
like Love & Logic ® is that the choice is not between these programs and
nothing. There are effective programs to help parents and teachers work with children
who are at risk for a range of developmental problems, and especially with
children who are aggressive, oppositional, and noncompliant. One such program,
with many years of evidentiary support behind it, is Parent Child Interaction
Therapy (PCIT), which focuses on children of preschool and early school age and
works to correct behavior problems before they interfere with school
achievement. PCIT uses play but is not a “play therapy” and does not depend on
children’s insight or private thoughts. Instead, its stress is on improving relationships
between children and adults and training adults to help children comply with
adult rules without having to use harsh or constant discipline.

Evidence-based programs like PCIT provide a lot of “bang
for the buck”. Money spent for them is not wasted, and authorities who approve
this kind of spending can be proud of their fiscal responsibility. Non-evidence-based
programs like Love & Logic ® waste money that is much needed for other educational
purposes. Now that programs like Love & Logic® have co-opted the public
school system for their own commercial advantage, it’s important for concerned
people to persuade state and local governments and teachers’ organizations to re-think past decisions
and stop this present and future waste of public funds.

4 comments:

Do you have any recommendations for lay parents (parents with basically "normal" kids) who are simply looking for effective, healthy discipline strategies? My brother and his wife use Love & Logic, but my parenting is informed by the principles of Elaine Mazlish and Adele Faber (How to Talk So Kids Will Listen...) as well as Dr. Laura Markham's Peaceful Parenting. How can a regular parent determine if these parent educators can be trusted?

Hi Nicole-- sorry to say this, but I think on the whole that determining this is very difficult. Some parenting advice is based on scientific evidence (e.g. how to use reward and punishment effectively), but most has never been tested systematically. I think it is a good idea to focus on issues of "basically normal kids" and to avoid methods that were derived from treatments for serious childhood problems. My beef with Love & Logic is that it was never shown to be effective for serious problems, but the proponents have sequed into using it for ordinary parenting. However, what will "work" for any particular family depends so much on individual and cultural factors that it's impossible to determine that any one method is good across the board. I would suggest avoiding methods that are highly authoritarian, that are dramatically different from anything the parents have done before, or that will not be supported or accepted in the family's social group. The advice that most of the suggestions share is to keep in mind that what the child does or says is generally not "about you", so parents need to avoid any perspective that stresses their dignity and the child's obligations to respect them. (Not that the child does not need to be guided to respect others, but this does not mean that any failure of respect to parents is horrible and must be stamped out.)

I think the best parenting "manuals" offer their advice as suggestions and do not promise wonderful though unlikely outcomes. Ideas like "peaceful parenting" need to be interpreted as meaning "more peaceful than some parenting" because it would be silly to imagine that living in a family of people of different ages and needs could ever be as peaceful as living alone!

My advice is, read a book carefully if it appeals to you. Try doing what it says for a couple of weeks just to see if YOU can do it, without regard to whether your kids are responding as you want. If you can't do it, don't fight that-- if you can, and have practiced for a while, ask your kids how they think it's going, and see how the whole family is doing. However, you also need to keep in mind that any change you make is likely to have some effect fairly soon, just because it's a change, and that change may not be a permanent one.

In my opinion, the very fact that you are trying to think how to act as a parent is very much to your credit and is the factor that is likely to produce a good outcome!

Thank you for taking the time to respond, Dr. Mercer. Like many parents, I want to raise respectful, capable adults - but I don't want to do it in a way that is also hurtful to them. While I wish there was a way to cross reference the bewildering world of parenting books against some kind of checklist of their effectiveness, it IS comforting to know that love, moderation and a little parental common sense can go a long way.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.